Alan Titchmarsh, chat-show host and romantic author, reflects on being
labelled a 'muppet’ by a Cabinet minister, his sex appeal and what makes for
the best garden

Alan Titchmarsh is a chat-show host, a gardener of 50 years’ experience, a writer of gentle romantic fiction and a man by whom it is quite difficult to be offended. So it was a surprise to all when the Environment Secretary, Owen Paterson, pronounced in an interview with this paper that the television presenter was a “complete muppet”. The reason for this very un-ministerial language? A disagreement on the Government’s plan to tackle ash dieback. I know, I know. You’re thinking: “These MPs hold up to the questioning of Jeremy Paxman and John Humphrys every day, but stick them in a ring with a one-time Pebble Mill at One presenter and they collapse like a house of cards.”

Anyway, what did Titchmarsh make of all this? “Hmmm,” he says, his nose scrunching up like a squashed turnip, his mood darkening like mulch. Alan isn’t the type to make a fuss – his philosophy, he says, “and it’s probably a failing sometimes, is to try and not upset people, to just bump my way through and try to not get in anybody’s way” – but this clearly riled him.

And not just him, it turns out, but also the Prime Minister, who actually wrote Titchmarsh a letter to apologise for the behaviour of his minister. I mean, this is the kind of national treasure the former Ground Force presenter is – half of southern England can be underwater and it takes David Cameron a month to apologise, but the moment Alan Titchmarsh looks a little misty, the stationery cupboard at No 10 can’t open fast enough.

“I can’t remember the exact phraseology,” says Titchmarsh, looking ever-so-slightly embarrassed, “but he apologised for things that were said out of turn.” Does David Cameron write to him often? “No! But I thought it was incredibly big-hearted and generous of him.” Though Titchmarsh never demanded an apology from the Prime Minister, he did write to Paterson, “just to say: 'This is where I stand, this is my position’ [Titchmarsh claimed that the horticultural industry had warned of ash dieback years before, and that government advice to wash your boots after visiting woodland was like “sticking a plaster on a broken leg”]. He very kindly invited me to lunch in his London house with him and his wife. And we discovered – which I think shocked him – that in 95 per cent of matters we were in complete agreement.” Paterson told Titchmarsh he believed he wasn’t being recorded when he made the remarks, “which I thought from a politician was rather naive”.

They may have kissed and made up, but that doesn’t mean Titchmarsh is done with the fighting talk. The Tories, he tells me, “were traditionally a party of the shires and they – how can one put it? – seem to have drifted away from that.” He thinks that the flooding crisis “has kind of crystallised their thoughts, they’ve realised the national importance of [the countryside]”. But, oh, he is worried.

“The countryside is the breadbasket, it’s the beating heart of Britain, and you neglect it at your peril. You start getting hardened arteries if you forget about it. I know we import a lot as a nation but we also grow a lot, and I think there is a disconnect between the people who manage the countryside and the town-dwellers, and that is to the detriment of both.”

The badger cull was a fine example of this. “Nobody gets upset about hunting rabbits, and yet we suddenly take to our hearts an animal that we think is cuddly. Now this is not me saying: 'Shoot them all!’ but we do need to find a way in which farmers can more readily protect their herds.” And he is concerned that “people who live in the centre of towns tend to forget that there’s a world outside. We need to come to some sort of rapprochement.”

What did he think of Lord Smith of Finsbury’s recent pronouncement that when it comes to future flooding, we will be able to protect either town or country, but not both? “That made me miserable,” he says, with a sad shake of the head. “If you go up in an aeroplane over this country, you discover that most of it is actually green, open spaces. It is what we are based on, it is what we are. A green and pleasant land! The countryside is our life blood. We need to cherish it, enjoy it, love it, understand it. Yes it’s frustrating, yes it’s challenging, but goodness me, you have a day like this,” he motions up to the bright blue sky, “and there really is nowhere better.”

We are, however, meeting at a studio in north London, not at his Hampshire home. “At least it has somewhere outside,” shrugs the 64-year-old, as we sit down at a table on a pontoon next to the canal. It wobbles a bit. “Oooh,” he exclaims, trying to drink his cup of tea (he’s a good Yorkshire boy is our Alan, born and bred in Ilkley), “did the earth move for you?”

We are here to talk about a new show he is doing for ITV, Britain’s Best Gardens, a fact that will amuse those of you who watched W1A, the BBC mockumentary that pokes fun at the corporation. In one episode, Titchmarsh turns downs a role presenting “Britain’s Tastiest Village”. “It was priceless,” he smiles. “Priceless! I had no idea I was going to be in it, I was very flattered. It’s a great giggle.”

Actually, this is the first time in 38 years that he won’t be doing anything for the BBC. In addition to Gardeners’ World and Ground Force, since 1983 he has presented its coverage of the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. This year though, he won’t. He was offered what he described as “limited appearances” on BBC One, with the in-depth BBC Two programmes he usually fronted having been given to Monty Don. “It’s a sadness, really, rather than a bitterness; if nothing else than from a sentimental point of view. But no job is for life. Gardening should be at the heart of the BBC but that doesn’t mean that I have to be at the heart of it. God willing, I will be back there one day.”

It’s not as if he’s got nothing going on. To celebrate his half a century in horticulture, the Royal Horticultural Society has asked him to design a garden at Chelsea this year, the first time he will have done one since 1985. He still has all his ITV work, including Love Your Garden, in which he travels Britain helping people transform their outside spaces. “It sounds a grandiose thing to say,” he flushes, “but gifting people with a garden changes lives. When you have a sense of your surroundings, it’s wonderfully enriching.”

He says that gardening “isn’t just about hanging baskets and window boxes, it’s about looking after your bit of Earth, and, in doing that, helping the bigger picture”, though, perhaps surprisingly for a man of the soil, he questions the role we humans have in climate change. “I think we’re probably exacerbating it but I get very annoyed it’s never mentioned that between umpteen ice ages there were warm tropical periods, which occurred naturally because of the tilt of the Earth’s axis, periods during which we weren’t around. It’s a volatile planet. It changes. It would be a bigger story if it stayed the same every year.”

He is a “looking after the pennies man” – of course he is! – “and too many people are talking about the pounds. I carry myself properly in my back garden and am responsible for that, rather than being one of those who runs around shouting about things and not actually doing anything.” He would never go into politics because “I think I’d be too frustrated that I couldn’t achieve anything. I remember saying to, and I won’t mention his name…” Oh go on. “…Well I remember saying to Michael Portillo, 'Do you miss not being able to make a difference?’ and he laughed and said: 'I couldn’t make a difference…’ ”

Anyway, Titchmarsh doesn’t have time for politics. He has his afternoon chat show on ITV – he’s had everyone from David Cameron to One Direction on – and even that’s getting too much for him, so he’s announced that the next series will be his last. “I will never retire, Bryony,” he says, mock-serious. “I’m not a workaholic, but I am a stimulation-aholic. I want to be like a long-distance runner and just slow it down a bit, so I can keep running. But I never want to stop. Stimulation is the key.”

And he has that in spades – the crest on his signet ring, by the way, is a lion with a spade – what with the endless books he does on gardening, not to mention fiction. His first novel, Mr MacGregor, won him a Bad Sex Award in 1998 for a passage in which someone or other got “entangled in the lissome limbs of this human boa constrictor”, but it was a hit. He’s done another seven since, all of which he describes as “romantic mysteries”.

Their success is perhaps not a surprise given that Titchmarsh is much admired by the opposite sex, with the Queen telling him – when she awarded him his MBE in 2000 – that he had “given a lot of ladies a lot of pleasure”, though I don’t think she meant this literally. Alan has been happily married to Alison for 39 years – they have two children, both primary teachers, and three grandchildren under the age of two – and when I ask him if he has ever been tempted to stray, he sucks his teeth in shock.

“No no. No! You know, you, you…” he seems to be at a loss for words. “Everybody is attracted to other people, but you’ve got to get your priorities right, that’s the important thing. When you have children, you have responsibilities and they have to be taken seriously. I don’t mean that they’re onerous, I mean it’s not just about you any more.” He worries that people nowadays act on things without any thought for the consequences.

“I think we are very inward-looking as a society. And, without getting on to an enormous hobby horse of mine” – go on, let’s – “well the whole internet generation, the fact you can live a completely isolated life, you don’t have to go out, you don’t have to talk to anybody, everything can come to you within 24 hours by pressing a button, and yet you’re losing the ability to do what we’re doing now… and that’s scary and sad. It fosters within people this insularity, and insularity is dangerous. Everyone talks about 'me’ time, but what about our time or their time?”

And don’t get him started on our culture of “instant gratification”, as he calls it. “Everyone is given to understand now that you shouldn’t have to wait, that you should have what you want when you want it. All those things that we were taught when we were growing up, like saving up for something, well there was actually an intrinsic value in doing that. The delight of anticipation!” His face lights up. “The postponement of gratification is frustrating sometimes, but when you do get it there is a great sense of achievement.”

We talk a bit about his pleasures – buying books, grubbing daisies from the lawn, a glass of wine at six o’clock in the garden. “I think my favourite sound is the blackbird on the chimney pot at the end of the day. Because there’s all this human overlay, which we have become so obsessed with. But we mustn’t lose sight of what it’s all about.” He goes quiet for a moment as a delighted smile spreads across his face. “It’s that blackbird saying: 'Hello, hello, this is the real world.’ And that’s lovely.”

To enter 'Britain’s Best Gardens’, please email alan@spungoldtv.com and, if possible, send a photograph of the garden. Alternatively, write to Britain’s Best Gardens, PO Box 64382, London EC2P 2GJ